


Bad Blood

by Sadistrix



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst and Porn, F/M, Phone Sex, conflicted feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 17:32:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19835155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sadistrix/pseuds/Sadistrix
Summary: “So how does a bounty hunter get tangled up in corporate sabotage?” Reaper asks, one question of many he’s been mulling over at the back of his mind since he’d singled Ana out on the private channel. He glances through the scattered papers left behind, but they’re not what really interests him.





	Bad Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This took so long for me to write that there are references to the idea of Ana/Jack from before he was said to be gay. I think they add more than they detract in the given context, so I'm leaving them in.

"Been a while since you've had me in your ear, hasn't it?" Ana asks, her voice husky and warm, almost like a caress.

It brings back memories of another time. Quiet, clipped communication, the reassuring steadiness of someone else's breathing. Ana telling him she was at his back, watching over... and then, when all was quiet, melting into liquid sex to tease and torment him so no one else would ever hear.

"I've done just fine." He keeps it clipped and to the point. Reaper doesn't need her looking out for him, and he certainly doesn't need her dredging up old memories of someone else's life.

He doesn't want to miss either. He certainly wouldn't admit it even if he did.

"Have you, Gabriel?" The question is less judgmental than he would have expected, but if there's a hint of sadness coloring her tone instead, Reaper elects to ignore it.

She leaves the line open, just like old times, but they don't talk about it.

They don't talk about anything at all. Reaper listens to Ana breathe, slow, steady, and familiar, and if he indulges himself far enough to tune out the chatter around him and close his eyes for a moment, she could be right beside him.

There's a part of him that's never stopped loving her. The feeling comes rushing right back alongside the flood of air in his lungs, Reaper's unconscious mimicry of Ana's inhale leaving him unnervingly lightheaded; as if he hasn't truly managed one like it since things in Overwatch went south beyond saving, since before Talon claimed credit for her death. It filters through the haze of pain for a moment, and Reaper hates her more fervently than ever for the reminder.

"If you're going to use lethal force, do it on someone else's behalf," Reaper says, forcing out the words before he can think better of them. No doubt Ana will read too much into it; will assume that because he remembers, he must care. He wonders how many notches line the side of her biotic rifle these days. If he'll merit one someday.

Reaper glances down at his own shotguns and thinks he could stand to mark them up when instead he's the one to even the score. "Death won't slow me down for long."

"Gabriel-"

She doesn't continue. Whether because she doesn't know what to say to him anymore, or thought better of whatever came to mind, Reaper can't be sure.

"Don't think it's personal."

"Professionally then," Ana replies after a moment, obviously choosing to humor him, "I'm glad to see you'll be on this side of my scope for a change."

He huffs something like a dismissal. 

They still make a great team, even after all these years.

“I’m flanking left,” Reaper mutters, trying to mask his annoyance knowing Ana’s already got him covered. It’d be worth taking a hit or two, if only to remind her that she’s failable. That when he needed her most - so full of rage it was suffocating, thanklessly playing second fiddle and trying to hold together a wreck of black ops division when he couldn’t even do the same for himself - she was nowhere to be found.

“On your six.”

He hears their footsteps a moment after Ana’s warning, grateful for the distraction; doesn’t have to look before he disintegrates into shadows and lets them run right on through.

Reaper grabs the last man and snaps his neck in a single maneuver before opening fire on the rest. Ana’s seen enough of him in action while trying to sabotage Talon ops that he doesn’t worry about holding back now, using the shadows to his advantage, rarely staying solid long enough for any of them to land a hit in return.

It feels good. Gets his blood flowing again. He’s run through them all before he even knows it and has to take a moment to regroup because his heart is pounding, entire body lit up with sensation, half a dozen men worth of life’s energy coursing through him. Reaper can’t help laughing.

“What happened to you?” Ana asks, and it takes Reaper a moment to reconcile the horror in her voice with the euphoric rush he’s riding.

Somewhere in him there’s an answer she might understand - how he can use this to heal himself, that it feels like ecstasy for a moment compared to the constant, rapid decay - but for now he’s drunk off of it and the first thing that springs to his lips is, “everyone’s got their vices.”

When Ana doesn’t reply, he takes a deep breath and starts back down the corridor.

Two more lefts, and she still hasn’t said a word. Reaper slips through a crack in the panelling, leaving her sights, but not the dull buzz of the comm in his ear. “I thought we had a mission.” He flicks the switches to disable the dock’s security and then cuts the floodlights. The darkness is tense, familiar.

“Copy that.”

They finish this mission, Ana turns her comm off, and that's the end of it. She's not going to be waiting there in his ear when he gets back to wherever he's spending the night. Not like old times, when they'd keep it open until dawn so neither of them had to face the night alone.

Reaper doesn’t know why it gets under his skin as badly as it does. How _she_ gets under his skin as badly as she does. “All you have to say, Ana?” he growls.

“What do you want, Gabriel?”

The edge to her tone isn’t new, but it feeds that gnawing, sick thing just below the surface of his skin, the heat in his veins that’s only just this side of bearable. Damned if she’s going to shut him out again.

“Not going to ask how my armor comes off?” Reaper taunts her. First to break, but he doesn’t care. Needs the satisfaction that is whispering venom over their shared comm, antagonizing her into acknowledging what they’ve been dancing around since he opened the line to find her there, damned shrike _haunting_ his every move - “Tell me how you touch yourself and hope I don’t realize it’s Jack, always _Jack_ you,”

“It was never about Jack,” Ana interrupts, eerily calm, “and you know it.”

The control room is only a few feet up on the right, but Reaper stops short. There’s a half-formed memory of something that might have tried to be pleasure once, a long time ago - when he could still feel it - the fleeting surety that no one in their mind would have turned down Ana Amari given the option, but those things barely register. It had all meant something once. Something faded and fragmented that Reaper is suddenly loathe to examine more closely.

“Wasn’t it?” he defies her.

Ana breathes out like she’s concentrating.

“Gabriel.” He’s distracted momentarily by the way she says the name, sinking like a stone to settle heavy and uncomfortable in his gut. The thud of a body hitting the floor pulls him back and Reaper turns to see a black-clad agent downed only halfway around the corner. “I was there for you.”

Damn her. Reaper bites his tongue bloody. “Until you weren’t.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Forget it.”

The disappointment in her voice stings long after they’ve both fallen silent again. Reaper huffs a breath and tries to refocus. To put the dull echoes of a past long behind him out of his mind.

He certainly won’t admit to the shadowy impressions he has left of Ana that everything has long since blurred together in a haze of pain and betrayal. That that and the bloodshed are all he knows anymore. 

“I wasn’t strong enough,” Ana says after a long moment. “You’re not the only one I failed.”

“Spare me the guilty conscience,” Reaper cuts her off. He throws his shotguns aside and braces himself to kick down the control room door. His nanites creep through the cracks ahead of him, spreading through the room and giving Reaper an idea of what’s waiting for him on the other side. A group of men are clustered around the desk, poking and prodding at a computer as if that’ll make their surveillance reappear. When someone points out the growing haze in the room, first there is confusion. Then, they panic. “What’s done is done.”

It’s as satisfying as it ever was to hear Ana’s intake of breath when he kicks in the reinforced steel. Death might not have been kind to him, but all the enhancements previous… Well.

Reaper makes quick work of the guards here too, less worried about attracting attention this time. Just a series of steps to a familiar cadence, shotguns extended, and the the small room - and everyone in it - is riddled by spray after spray of bullets. He tosses them again when he’s done - no need to lug around dead weight - and moves towards the desk.

“So how does a bounty hunter get tangled up in corporate sabotage?” Reaper asks, one question of many he’s been mulling over at the back of his mind since he’d singled Ana out on the private channel. He glances through the scattered papers left behind, but they’re not what really interests him.

His own involvement had been Sombra’s idea - one of her little side projects Reaper had seen fit to indulge. Interesting, then, to find Amari here.

“How does a mercenary?”

“Someone pays me enough to take the job,” Reaper says. The computer is damaged, but not so much that the device Sombra had given him doesn’t register. It lights up as if it’s transferring the files, so he turns his attention towards the filing cabinet. Invoices, she’d said. Or anything else that looks suspicious - as if the ex-head of a black-ops division would ever need reminding.

There’s a sly sort of humor in Ana’s tone when she speaks up again, more than enough to get right back under Reaper’s skin. “How much do ex-Overwatch agents go for?”

_Enough for me to be worth your time?_

“That depends on how much of a nuisance they are,” he growls, already knowing she’s not likely to drop it. Reaper pries open the metal drawers one by one with his talons, the irritating screech of metal on metal grating his nerves nearly as badly as the direction Ana’s chatter has taken them.

“I’d say I’ve inconvenienced Talon a fair amount,” she needles him further.

Anything Reaper could say is just as damning as his silence. Either admit he wants her dead enough to do the job himself, or prove himself a hypocrite. That Reaper can’t decide which outcome he despises more -

His claws shred right through the first sheaf of papers Reaper tries to pull from the drawer, and he huffs a frustrated curse. It isn’t like him to be this sloppy. He’s vexed by his own distraction, his inability to tune Ana out or fully muster the conviction to bring his wrath down on her.

“I take it we won’t be catching up over drinks later.”

The humor in her tone stings worse than the dismissal. She’s cool-headed as ever; worse, knows she has the upper hand. But two can play at that game.

“I didn’t think you were the sentimental type, Ana.”

“I didn’t think you’d sell out to Talon.”

“You’ve seen what Overwatch did to me,” Reaper growls. “Talon offered vengeance, and I intend to take it.”

“Vengeance for what? You saw what Talon did to Amelie. To Gerard.” A deep breath. “To me.” She pauses for a moment - as if to let that sink in, to see if her shots have hit the mark - but Reaper can tell she’s not done. His skin prickles with preemptive annoyance. That gnawing ache is back, spreading between his ribs, but Reaper determinedly gives her no indication. “Do you really think dragging out a grudge match with the remnants of Overwatch is going to fix you? You were always stubborn, Gabriel, but that’s a new low even for you.”

 _A new low_ \- after all he’d done, everything he’d sacrificed -

“Do you know what it feels like to decay?” Reaper snarls. “To need bloodshed just to hold yourself together? Imagine the worst pain of your life and multiply it until you’d beg for death - every second of every day. Only I can’t _die_ , Ana.” If she had eyes on him now she’d see how the swirling mess of nanites and decaying flesh whip into a hurricane about him, too agitated to remain corporeal. It’s a chaotic, miserable state, the blurred, uncertain line between existence and… whatever else there is.

Reaper takes a deep breath and forces himself back into something mocking order. “Overwatch made this monster and they can pay the price.”

At last, Ana is silent, but he can’t help but feel it’s a hollow victory. Now she knows what he’s become. That she can save her breath, because there’s nothing left in him worth saving. “Update?” He gathers up the last of the paperwork he’s stealing and tucks it away into his coat.

“We’re done. Rendezvous at the extraction point by o-three hundred.”

So she’d waited for him to finish chasing his own agenda. But why?

“I have my own transport.”

“Of course you do.” The telltale click of Ana’s rifle sounds over her comm, and Reaper knows it was a deliberate move to let him hear her taking it apart. He could be beside her in a moment; fall apart into shadows and follow the scent until he’s reached her perch. She might know it. The thought of meeting her face to face, putting something solid, fleshy, to the voice in his ear, lingers, tempting. And right after she let him know that she’s barely armed.

She might as well have let him hear the sound of her coat hitting the floor.

Reaper’s thoughts flit first to the rest of her gear - the exact places she’ll have tucked grenades and biotics, spare parts, her sidearm - and then to the strange, hazy idea of Ana herself, unguarded and vulnerable. He’s never touched her. Never tried to make more of that nebulous, uncertain intimacy than what it was so long ago. 

He wonders what it might be like to now.

She’ll have aged the way he never will, and it’s a sudden, sick fascination in its own right. She might have grown softer around the edges, more beautiful and more delicate by fractions. He wonders how her old scars have faded. If any are new.

“Ana,” Reaper says against his better judgement. He doesn’t know what to say to her, only that the thought of silence - of his own thoughts - looms lonely and dark. “Wait.”

She lets out a heavy breath. Then, finally, “I’m not ready to say goodbye either.”

“Call it a truce,” Ana suggests, “just for the night.”

“A truce,” Reaper repeats. He’s too aware of how Ana might hear the broken timbre of his voice in the silence, nothing to distract from the inescapable raspiness or less than subtle tinge of machinery. Ana’s has changed too, over the years, but not nearly so drastically. Serving no such testament to the kind of horror he’s become.

He paces the small entryway of the safehouse, the only space other than the darkened bedroom, and wonders if he’s made a mistake. Reaper half expects Sombra to come through on the small tv to ask him what’s taking so long. But even she wouldn’t dare interrupt him with a comm line open unless she had a damn good reason. It’s just them.

“Unless you have a better word for it,” Ana says with the barest hint of amusement in her voice.

“We don’t need to call this anything,” Reaper defies her. He’s already trying not to look too closely at whatever that is, at whatever could possibly have possessed him to keep the line open past any excusable amount of confusion.

She sighs. “I don’t suppose we ever did.”

The line descends into silence, or close enough, a low, static hum and then the telltale inhalation of Ana’s breath that reminds Reaper to breathe in turn.

“You know,” she starts, “it isn’t just Talon operations I’ve been watching.”

He knows how this goes. He knows it like he knows breathing: familiar and yet somehow no easier for it. There’s a dozen responses that flit to his tongue, most of them venomous and deliberately misunderstood. He doesn’t think he wants a fight, but-

Reaper digs his claws into his thigh, exhales forcefully. “Have you fucked him yet?”

“No,” Ana says, not rising to the bait, much too calm when he’s burning up and grasping for an accusation that might stick, “but I might.” There’s a lingering note of sadness in her voice that Reaper can’t quite place until she adds, altogether too reasonably, “you’re not the only one who’s lonely.”

He doesn’t know how to respond.

“We _could_ talk about Jack, if that’s what you want.”

“ _No_.”

“Then take off your coat.” The order is soft, but sudden, and Reaper hesitates for a moment before he can bring himself to comply.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” he challenges her. Ana must be lonely, to carry on this charade when he’d seen her reaction to his face back in Egypt. She can’t possibly think the rest of him would look any better, any more palatable. The traitorous thought that perhaps she’s not imagining him at all crowds its way into his head and then it won’t let Reaper be.

“I’ve never been accused of being unable to make up my mind,” Ana points out, but he can barely hear her over the pounding of blood in his ears.

“Then why-” Reaper snarls.

“I’ve missed this. Missed _you_ , even.”

The suggestion sticks between his ribs like a spear. If it’s Jack, if it’s Wilhelm, if it’s the man he can barely remember being… Reaper doesn’t want to know. “Then pretend I’m him,” he says before he has time to be ashamed of the request. It's a sick, shivery feeling that washes over him at the sound of himself repeating a name he hasn't had use for in nearly a decade, but he forces it out all the same, "Gabriel."

Ana doesn't protest. "If that's what you want."

He doesn’t know _what_ he wants. There’s no map for the minefield lurking between them. Reaper shrugs out of his coat and leaves it draped over the back of a chair. He paces through the door of the small bedroom before he can think better of it, drawing more on a well-practiced habit of bravado than any real conviction. “Your turn.”

“I have a few more layers, I think,” Ana says, and though Reaper tries to calculate how it all comes together - where the weak points are - he doesn’t ask. It’s far too easy to fixate on the places he might jam his claws into to crack apart Ana’s body armor like another obsolete piece of machinery… But for now she’s already vulnerable to him of her own doing.

Reaper still doesn’t know what to make of that.

If he sits back on the small bed and closes his eyes, he could picture her right there, his hearing sensitive enough to pick up the cadence of Ana’s steady breathing and below it the rustle of clothing being removed even over the comm line. It’s an intoxicating thought. If Ana was here with him -

If she were here they couldn’t do this.

“How does it feel?” he settles on, dredging up a long forgotten memory of peeling off sweaty tactical gear and feeling a hundred pounds lighter for it; that first unencumbered stretch an achy sort of bliss all its own and the sensation of air circulating against his damp skin a shock after so long. It’s been years, but he can still grasp at the picture of Ana stripping down with the rest them in locker rooms, smooth brown skin at contrast with her utilitarian undergarments.

“Tedious,” Ana needles him. “This isn’t all regulation. Though I suppose _you_ don’t have that problem.”

She wants to ask, the way the silence hangs between them again.

But she doesn’t. “Touch yourself for me,” Ana says.

Reaper bites his tongue bloody for the second time tonight. He squeezes the flesh of his thigh and thinks about pretending, but then he hears himself say as if from somewhere far off, bitterly amused, “wouldn’t do much.”

Ana’s intake of breath should probably give him a vicious thrill: plays right into the cynical self-sabotage he’s come to feed on half as much as his targets. Instead he feels ancient with the admission. Bone tired; the kind of calm that only comes hand in hand with utter defeat. If he could muster the emotion for it, he’d wonder exactly when he let this latest escapade go so completely, irredeemably to shit. “Gabriel, we don’t have to...” Ana begins, trailing off into silence that Reaper lets hang between them for another moment.

He’s made up his mind, everything else be damned. “No. Let me hear you.”

One last night. Something to remember her by when next time he gets the upper hand.

“Since we’re pretending,” he says. The fantasy is paper thin at best. He sounds nothing at all like he once did, nor would he know where to begin at keeping up the charade. Between them the silent comm line looms like an abyss.

Ana breathes out heavily.

He can picture it already. Grabbing her up, slamming her back against the wall and tearing that damned mask from her face so that he can replace it with his own. His hands would leave bruises on her skin. He’d bite hard enough to draw blood. “I want to touch you,” he amuses himself by saying.

She laughs, but it’s shaky. A moment later he can make out the soft, wet sounds that could only be Ana beginning to touch herself at last. “Tell me what you really want.”

There’s an unnatural heat pooling beneath his skin, familiar gear gone stifling in the small room. He has the mental image of Ana’s eyes on him - scrutinizing - as they were once, a deep, piercing honey-gold. Infuriatingly knowing. Always too kind for her own good. Reaper tears off the rest of the plating covering his chest, heady and claustrophobic. “I want to tear you apart,” he vows, split between menacing and downright obscene, “get inside of you so far you’ll never rip me out.”

“That’s more like it.”

He’s not sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t Ana’s encouragement. “Didn’t think _you_ were a masochist.”

“Just give me what I want, Gabriel.”

“I would,” Reaper says before he can think better of it. He’s unnerved by how easily the truth comes out - by the tightness in his chest at the sound of Ana saying his name. There’s something she’s not telling him. Something unspoken that prickles at him before Reaper pushes it back. “I’ve been imagining how I’d ruin you since Egypt.”

Ana’s breath hitches and then she moans softly. “Good.”

“Good,” Reaper repeats. 

“It’s not nice to let me get the upper hand _every_ time.”

He snarls by way of answer, focusing himself instead on the heat of her thighs across his before she’d ripped the mask from his face. It’s a deflection, he’s sure of it. Antagonizing him to cover for whatever it is she won’t say. Two can play that game as well.

“I thought you liked to be on top,” he counters.

Even her laughter is unexpected. Reaper scowls, trying to decipher the sudden enigma that is Ana Amari over his comms once again: older and throatier and somehow more capricious, and - and no less capable of making his breath catch with every hesitation of her own.

If she were here, he might find the balance between fucking her the way he always yearned to and making sure Ana will never, ever forgive him for it.

Frustrated, Reaper palms himself to the cadence of Ana’s open-mouthed exhales. It’s not enough - won’t be enough no matter how he tries - but he groans in near-pavlovian reaction to a hand on his cock regardless. Let her think whatever she wants.

“There was a mirror in my room at headquarters,” she says, as if Reaper didn’t already know. “I’ll admit, I used to imagine seeing you in it.” A pause, another hitch to her breathing. “I still do.”

 _Still_. Reaper mouths the word, bitterness settling back onto his tongue in its place.

He can’t picture it anymore, can’t reconcile all that’s happened since - not her death, not his - can’t ever go back to being whatever it is Ana wants him to be. He’d hate her for that if nothing else. “Is that what you’re thinking about?” _Fucking someone that might as well be a stranger to them both, still_ whole, _still_ desirable -

“I’ve spent years thinking about you, Gabriel,” Ana says, as if she’s able to predict, once more, where Reaper’s thoughts have taken him. “I’d fuck some sense into you if I could.” She makes a noise that could only be in reaction to the motion of her hand - or how she imagines she might accomplish such a feat - but then follows it with a breathless laugh that sticks in Reaper’s ribs alongside the suggestion, “that much hasn’t changed.”

He remembers her frustration now. Her disapproval. Towards the end, the tense silence over their comms in lieu of chatter, or otherwise only a wordless feedback loop of obscene noises: getting off to the sound of someone else long past when they might have trusted themselves to speak, far less a comfort than a habit.

“Too little, too late,” Reaper growls.

“I know.” Her voice is breathy, a desperate note to it that sets off something new in the pit of Reaper’s stomach. He imagines what it would have been like to have his way with her back in the desert. To have toppled her back into the shifting sands and forced her to look at what she’d unmasked. To bare himself to her the way they’d cringed away from for so long - let Ana see every last bit of ugliness she’d shied away from back then - “ _I know_.”

“Beg me,” he says. In the past, he’d been happy to let Ana take charge. But not tonight.

Ana moans. “Gabriel-”

“No.”

She hesitates, swallows hard. The game’s changed - if they ever were playing - and Ana knows it. Reaper has enough time to wonder if she’s finally reconsidered.

“ _Reaper_.” Ana’s breath catches again.

“I should have finished this in the desert,” he swears. His mouth waters just thinking about it, long past the shame of what he’s become. He’d had every advantage - there was nothing Jack could have done if he’d only reached up and snapped Ana’s neck from where she’d sat astride him - so close to victory and instead he’d fled…

“If you wanted me to bleed for you,” Ana says, far too reasonably for how thick her voice sounds, “all you had to do was ask.”

“I won’t make you a martyr,” Reaper vows. “ _That’s_ what you want, isn’t it? Getting old, losing your touch…” He laughs, all of the pieces finally falling back into place. “When I’m done with you I’ll drag what’s left back to Talon. I’m sure Amelie would love the company.”

Her breathing stops. It sends a thrill through him like nothing else, a burst of electricity in his veins. The kind of _alive_ he only ever feels these days when there’s blood on his hands and a body at his feet. Because why kill her when he could have this instead - Ana and her messy loyalties, lust mixed with despair and disgust for what he’s become - over and over again. He could eviscerate her a thousand times and never tire of it.

Reaper growls over the comm line - low and predatory, just the kind of sound he knows will push Ana over the edge - perversely invested in hearing her tremble apart to one last betrayal. “I want you to hate me forever.”


End file.
